Atroxhity

1. Introduction

For this project, each participant selected a title taken from one of the 15 chapters in the atrocity exhibition (by JGBallard); the text provided to CrashTest had to be somehow related to the theme or concept of “atrocity_exhibition”; it could be inspired by the book, by the movie or by anything else that was deemed to be connected to the convergence/collision of inner and outer landscapes. The objective was not to produce a pastiche of the AEx but to use it as a point of entry into this undifferentiated chaos where news bulletins, scientific reports, dialogues, pulsions are amalgamated, decontextualised and often placed at the same level; at the same time we wanted to explore the idea of exposure, exhibition and see how the irrational, the unspeakable can be re-packaged, re-ordered to acquire a different meaning.
The 15 chapters are:
1. The Atrocity Exhibition
2. The University of Death
3. The Assassination Weapon
4. You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe
5. Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown
6. The Great American Nude
7. The Summer Cannibals
8. Tolerances of the Human Face
9. You and Me and the Continuum
10. Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy
11. Love and Napalm: Export U.S.A.
12. Crash!
13. The Generations of America
14. Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan
15. The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race

3. Atrocity X, a subjective and chaotic web inventory

Jonathan Weiss, Atrocity X (movie 2001):

Hassan Musa, The Great American Nude

Andrés Vaccari, Chariot of fire (Preliminary Analysis and Damage Reconstruction of the Death of Diana, Princess of Wales):

Mike Bonsall , JGB, The Short Fiction Concordance (“Particularly in his short work, Ballard has always experimented with the form of his fictions; fiction as book index, as questionnaire, as psychiatric report. This concordance of Ballard’s short works is part of a project to ‘decode’ the work using some of Ballard’s own techniques”):

Atrocity X, a bizarre and psychedelic video from a cable TV program:

Atrocity X, an underground fanzine:

Thomas Cazals, The Oracle of Shepperton (docu-fiction, 2006):

Richard Curson Smith, Home (adaptation of Ballard’s short story “The Enormous Space”):